James Denselow

James Denselow is a writer on Middle East politics and security issues.

Articles

James writes regularly for The Guardian and has written articles for Middle East International, The Huffington Post The New Statesman, Syria Today, The World Today, The Daily Telegraph and The Yorkshire Post. He has been cited in many international publications including The Boston Globe, Voice of America, The Sunday Telegraph, Reuters and AFP

(Al Jazeera English) US President Barack Obama's offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) takes place at a time of heightened chaos across the region. The strategy is both complex and risky. It requires multilateral cooperation, to date unseen competence on the part of the Iraqi military and politicians, and for an ISIL response to be contained. Yet, the rewards for all parties concerned could be worth the investment in this new "coalition of the willing". In short, everyone could be a winner, excepting those civilians stuck in the middle.

Why is this? To date, the rapid emergence of ISIL has been characterised by those who have so obviously lost. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi military and the unfortunate hostages who've met gruesome deaths, stand out. But the brutality of ISIL and its willingness to tear down conventional norms of what the state should look like in the Middle East, place it in the crosshairs of almost all the players in the region. This confluence of interests in destroying or at least significantly marginalising ISIL was effectively shown in an infographic published this week in the Economist, put simply - everyone hates ISIL.

What does this mean in more detail? For Iraq, the fight against ISIL is a chance for the new prime minister, Haider al-Abbadi, to deliver a genuine and legitimate national unity government that brings Iraqis together rather than forcing them apart on the basis of sect or ethnicity. With the might of US air power, logistics and intelligence behind him, Abbadi will have the chance to fashion a vision of Iraq for all Iraqis that balances a traditional Baghdad-centric nationalism with the realities of federal demands from across the country and in particular from the Kurds and the Sunnis. Resource sharing, political recognition, and national reconciliation are the priorities for Abbadi with the threat of ISIL attacks being used as a common enemy going forward.

(Al-Jazeera) Tonight, US President Barack Obama will announce the latest chapter of US military intervention in the Middle East. The president is a reluctant interventionist with his foreign policy to date defined by caution and an attempt to distance himself from the conflicts started by his predecessor. However, the dramatic rise of the self-styled Islamic State group, which the world woke up to in June when they captured Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, has forced his hand.

The Mount Sinjar crisis, which raised real concerns that the Kurdistan Region could fall, and the horrific executions of US journalists are all milestones in the run-up to the new strategy Obama will announce to the American people on prime-time tonight from Washington.

(Majalla) The Syrian government’s capture of Homs, the so-called ‘capital of the revolution,’ and Bashar Al-Assad’s inevitable victory in the upcoming presidential “election” appear to put the regime in a stronger position than ever before—but have these short-term victories come at a long-term cost?

Events in Homs last week raised questions about Assad’s future—questions that few have thought to ask so far. While Syrian state media wanted people to focus on the removal of the rubble, the reopening of the city’s shops, and the tourism minister’s bizarre claims that thousands would now flock to visit the city, deadly clashes broke out between two pro-Assad militia groups, the National Defense Forces and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. While the story barely registered with the international press, who’ve grown more accustomed to reporting on the infighting that has come to characterize the opposition, it is worth exploring for the light it sheds on the possible future direction of the country.

While Assad’s father was able to fully restore his full authority across the country following the crushing of the uprising in Hama in 1982, there is no guarantee that Bashar will be able to put the country back together again. Indeed, the fighting in Homs may be a sign of things to come, and the consequence of Assad’s ‘outsourcing’ of the defense of his regime to groups from both inside the country and across the region. These famously include between 4,000–5,000 members of Hezbollah, in addition to Iraqi militiamen and senior commanders from the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Syrian regime has also sought to empower informal—and notorious—local militias known as Shabiha(“ghosts”), as well as 60,000 members of the paramilitary ‘National Defense Force,’ whose role in a future Syria is debatable, to say the least.

Majalla - The worst violence in six years defined the backdrop for the Iraqi elections in April. The vote, the first to take place since the US troop withdrawal in 2011, briefly pushed the beleaguered country back onto the news agenda. Before then it seemed that only particularly bloody days would register in the Western press. How did it come to be that the mass Western investment of blood and treasure into the country in 2003 has transformed into such indifference?

Iraq has become a family secret, the hideously malformed child hidden away in the attic, whose presence is only acknowledged on rare and awkward occasions. In the UK this is particularly true with the Chilcot Inquiry, ongoing since 2009, testing the patience of the prime minister as to when it will reveal its findings. Iraq’s state of permanent chaos, of market bombings and assassinations, has turned it into a toxic issue which politicians avoid, one which bores the public and which the media struggles to contain into a coherent narrative.

(Open Democracy) Last week the UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi reported from the Geneva II peace talks that while no substantive progress had been reached so far "ice was being broken". Visions of what the conference aimed to achieve were vastly divergent from the start. The opposition hoped to implement the terms of the Geneva I agreement concerning a transition of power, while the regime framed the meetings within a narrative of support against counter-terrorism. In the absence of likely agreements as to either side’s primary aims there is hope that common ground can be found on securing humanitarian access to the beleaguered country.

Six and a half million Syrians are now internally displaced. Hundreds of thousands are stuck within a number of besieged areas of the country where reports suggest that starvation is being used as a weapon of war. In the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in the suburbs of Damascus, home to an estimated 20,000 people, things are getting desperate. While a record-breaking number of press credentials (+1,000) were issued at Geneva II, there are no journalists reporting from inside Yarmouk, where stories are emerging of people being forced to eat stray animals in the face of massive food shortages.